Debian Security Advisory

DSA-023-1 inn2 -- local tempfile vulnerabilities

People at WireX have found several potential insecure uses of temporary files in programs provided by INN2. Some of them only lead to a vulnerability to symlink attacks if the temporary directory was set to /tmp or /var/tmp, which is the case in many installations, at least in Debian packages. An attacker could overwrite any file owned by the news system administrator, i.e. owned by news.news.

Michal Zalewski found an exploitable buffer overflow with regard to cancel messages and their verification. This bug did only show up if "verifycancels" was enabled in inn.conf which is not the default and has been disrecommended by upstream.

Andi Kleen found a bug in INN2 that makes innd crash for two byte headers. There is a chance this can only be exploited with uucp.